Video Rant, Then Deadly Rampage in California Town

Slide Show|11 Photos

Deadly Rampage in California

Deadly Rampage in California

CreditJae C. Hong/Associated Press

ISLA VISTA, Calif. — A college student who posted videos that documented his rage against women for rejecting him killed six people and wounded 13 others during a spasm of terror on Friday night, the police said. He stabbed three men to death in his apartment and shot the others as he methodically opened fire on bystanders on the crowded streets of this small town.

The gunman, identified by the police as Elliot O. Rodger, 22, was found dead with a bullet wound to his head after his black BMW crashed into a parked car following two shootouts with sheriff’s deputies near the University of California, Santa Barbara. The police said he had apparently taken his own life. Three semiautomatic handguns, along with 41 loaded 10-round magazines — all bought legally at local gun stores — were found in his car.

Barely 24 hours before the killing spree, Mr. Rodger, a student at Santa Barbara City College, had posted a video on YouTube in which he sat behind the steering wheel of his black BMW and for seven minutes recounted the isolation and sexual frustrations of his life, pausing for an occasional self-mocking laugh.

He spoke of the women who rejected him, the happiness he saw around him, and his life as a virgin at the age of 22. He called his message “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” and said it was the last video he would post.

“It all has to come to this,” Mr. Rodger says, his voice at once placid and chilling. “Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day I will have my retribution against humanity. Against all of you. For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me. I’m 22 years old, and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl. I have been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. All because girls have never been attracted to me. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.”

“I do not know why you girls aren’t attracted to me,” he said, “But I will punish you all for it.”

On Friday, at 9:27 p.m. in this town just north of Santa Barbara, the police said that Mr. Rodger started what turned out to be the second part of his revenge, which began shortly after he left his apartment, the first of the 12 crime scenes along Mr. Rodger’s route.

Witnesses said they saw three body bags being taken out from the apartment complex; the police said all three victims had been stabbed multiple times. Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County described it as “a pretty horrific crime scene.”

In addition to the video, Mr. Rodger had prepared a 141-page manifesto laying out his plan for the killings, starting with luring potential victims to his apartment.

Photo

The gunman is believed to be Elliot Rodger, 22, who in a YouTube video said he was sexually frustrated and about to go on “a mission of retribution.”

“We have obtained and are analyzing written and videotaped evidence that suggests that this atrocity was a premeditated mass murder,” Sheriff Brown said.

Mr. Rodger’s decision to target young women — in his video, he spoke bitterly of “stuck-up blonde” women who had refused his advances, preferring the “obnoxious young brutes” he saw walking on the beach or the tree-lined campus — was particularly chilling. This was what should have been a festive Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer; instead, the day was filled with images of women sobbing. In one case, a young woman recounted how a bullet had narrowly missed her head.

Kyle Sullivan, 19, a student at Santa Barbara City College, told CNN that he saw three women sprawled in the grass in front of the Alpha Phi sorority house. Only one of them appeared conscious and she had called her mother on her cellphone and told her in a frantic voice that she was not sure if she would survive.

In his manifesto, which he called “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” Mr. Rodger said the police had visited his apartment in April, acting on the complaints of his mother, who was alarmed by videos he had posted online. He said he had managed to convince the police that there was nothing to worry about, and quickly took down the videos — posting them again in the days before what he called his “Day of Retribution.”

The sheriff acknowledged that deputies had visited Mr. Rodger’s apartment on April 30, but said he had appeared courteous and polite, and did not meet the conditions that would have permitted them to confine him.

“You’ve got to understand that this is a fairly routine kind of call that is quite commonplace,” he said. “The deputies are well trained and are adept at handling these kind of calls.”

They reported two other encounters with Mr. Rodger, including once when he reported that he had been attacked and once when he called because he wanted to file charges against a roommate for stealing three candles with a value of $22.

In his videos, a blog, his Facebook and the manifesto, Mr. Rodger portrayed himself as a loner in a perpetually sunny college town on the California coast. He spoke of going to beaches and watching with rage as couples held hands or kissed and of escaping to serenity on the local golf course because he knew, he said, he would not see a couple there.

He posted on sites where other young men shared their rages and frustrations at being virgins, and complained to classmates about the difficulty of meeting women. He referred to himself as an “INCEL,” short for “involuntary celibate.”

“Why do girls hate me so much?” was the name of one of the videos he posted. His agitation appeared to grow over time.

His father, Peter Rodger, who is British and lives in Los Angeles, has written screenplays and was the second unit director on the film “The Hunger Games.” His son boasted, on his Google Plus page, of attending the world premiere of that and other films.

The family, through a lawyer, issued a statement expressing their sympathy for the victims.

“We offer our deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy,” said the statement, read by the lawyer, Alan Shifman. “We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain and our hearts go out to everyone involved.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Rodger was, from a young age, emotionally disturbed, particularly since the divorce of his parents when he was in first grade, family friends said. Patrick Connors, 23, a former classmate at Crespi Carmelite High School, a Catholic school for boys in Los Angeles, said Mr. Rodger had left school before graduation. He said that Mr. Rodger was treated by his classmates as an oddball and that students mocked him and played jokes on him; once when Mr. Rodger fell asleep in his seat, classmates taped his head to his desk, he said.

“We said right from the get-go that that kid was going to lose it someday and just freak out,” he said. “Everyone made fun of him and stuff.”

George Duarte, who attended a mathematics laboratory with Mr. Rodger at the college, said he complained about his roommates for having a water pipe in the room, but mostly about girls.

“He kept talking about how annoying the girls were,” Mr. Duarte said. “He was stuck on the same topic.”

Kathy Bloeser, a family friend of Mr. Rodger’s, said he was “emotionally troubled.”

“We used to have him over here almost every day with his sister,” she said. “He would hide. He wouldn’t say much, I think he was bullied a bit.”

She said Mr. Rodger had recently posted on Facebook that he was a virgin and was met with a barrage of taunts, so he took the post down. “He was so tired of being made fun of,” she said.

Photo

Deputy sheriffs inspect the vehicle of the shooting suspect.Credit
Diego Robles for The New York Times

The six people killed, as well as Mr. Rodger, were declared dead at crime scenes scattered across the grid of streets he traveled. In addition to the three killed at his apartment, Mr. Rodger killed two women in front of the Alpha Phi sorority at the University of California campus — leaving another woman there severely wounded — and one young man eating at the IV Deli Mart on Pardall Road, a Friday night gathering spot.

The sheriff said Mr. Rodger, apparently trying to act on what he threatened to do to sorority women in his video and manifesto, headed to the sorority and banged on the door for two minutes. When no one answered he fired on people outside.

The identities of the victims were slowly emerging, some in distraught posts on Facebook by devastated parents. “Veronika Weiss. 1995-2014. Innocent victim of the Goleta shooting rampage last night,” read a post by Bob Weiss. Another was Katie Cooper, whose death was confirmed by her mother, Kelli, in a telephone conversation before she broke down in tears and said she could not talk anymore.

The father of Christopher Michaels-Martinez, the man killed in the delicatessen, offered a wrenching denunciation of gun advocates and policies that he said lead to the death of his child.

“This death has left our family lost and broken,” said the father, Richard Martinez. “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop?”

Witnesses said bystanders, confused at first by the pop-pop-pop of gunshots, began diving to the ground or running for cover as Mr. Rodger drove through the neighborhood.

Ian Papa, 20, a student at Santa Barbara City College, said he was going to get a slice of pizza when he encountered Mr. Rodger, who drove his car swiftly and wildly through the streets, at one point knocking down two bicyclists and mangling the leg of one of them.

“We saw a BMW driving slowly, and then in seconds it hit the accelerator — it was going 60-plus,” Mr. Papa said. “He hit two bikes. One he barely grazed. The other was plowed down. The biker went through the windshield, and the driver took off.”

The university is about 10 miles from downtown Santa Barbara and has just over 22,000 students.

Santa Barbara sheriff’s deputies pulled dozens of bags of evidence out of his apartment complex. The bags were labeled “handwritten journal,” “2 machetes, 1 knife, 1 hammer,” and “Bags of empty Ammo boxes found under bed.”

Correction: May 24, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the college where Elliot Rodger was a student. It is Santa Barbara City College, not Santa Barbara Community College. ​In addition, a picture caption with this article misstated the name of the college campus near the shooting. As the article correctly notes,​ ​it is the University of California, Santa Barbara — not ​​the University of Santa Barbara.​

Correction: May 30, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of one of the victims. He is Christopher Michaels-Martinez, not Christopher Michael-Martinez.

Correction: June 15, 2014
An article on May 25 about the shooting rampage in Southern California omitted six sentences from the opening quotation taken from a video posted by the gunman, Elliot O. Rodger. The quotation (with the omitted sentences shown in italicized type) should have read: “It all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you. For the last eight years of my life, ever since I’ve hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me. I’m 22 years old, and I’m still a virgin. I’ve never even kissed a girl. I have been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous. College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Deadly Rampage in College Town After Video Rant. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe